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Showing posts from January, 2014

ShadowCraft ShadowProtect - Employee of the Month

The last two weeks have been absolutely awful. The IOmega NAS I mentioned in a previous post had a large number of things go wrong with it all at the same time, resulting in complete failure and total data loss. This also meant a significant amount of down time for a client and ridiculous amounts of stress for me. The good thing to come out of it was the performance of ShadowProtect. This backup solution far exceeded my expectations to the point where once the recoveries were completed we had only lost 10 minutes of work. Very little data was realistically lost, only time as we worked to recover it. The Recovery Environment was easy to use and the Hardware Independent Restore allowed me to recover virtual machine from VMware 4 ESX to VMware Player, a physical machine and also to XenServer 6.2 quite a remarkable feat really. I've had this client running in borrowed hardware for a week while we get new gear in. The snapshot capability, ease of restore and simply replication of back

Experiences with the IOmega ix12 NAS

One of my clients has an IOmega ix12 - a rack mounted, 12x3.5" bay NAS. This one in question is running 2.6.5.something firmware and has (or should I say had) 8 x 1TB disks in it. Today it dropped another one. The NAS has been set up with a RAID10 with total storage of 2TB (1.5 or so in reality). Although it has this redundancy, I can assure you it's not all that it's cracked up to be. In the main storage pool is a number of iSCSI drives shared out with various ESX servers. Sadly, the largest and most important of these iSCSI drives has an unfortunate tendency to vanish whenever there is a disk issue. Today one of the drives failed. No big deal right? RAID10 is tolerant of such faults usually. This one kept going except for the aforementioned large drive that disappeared like magic. After replacing the disk, impatiently waiting for it to rebuild and then attempting to reconnect the iSCSI drives I realised I still couldn't see it. The fix? Turn the NAS completely off,

VMware nightmares

After a great couple of days away I was called urgently to work - one of my client's networks was down and my colleague was stuck. The VMsphere client couldn't see the hosts, which couldn't see their datastores and the network had zero stability. Yay. Just wanted I wanted to come home to. The servers are running ESXi 4.1 that needs a few updates but the networks stability has always been a real issue for us. We took it over from some other chaps, solving a long series of issues with the servers and particularly the IOmega NAS. Throw in a database issue on one of the guest servers that kept the disk IO at absolute peak all the time and things were pretty tricky. All those things have been resolved, more or less, and the network had been fully functional for some months. So why did it change? Several reasons and I hope you take away from this some ideas for yourself. The NAS appeared to have dropped a disk and while it has a RAID10 set up, it paralysed the system (not at al

The pure awesomeness of Google Forms

As a Google Apps reseller it never fails to surprise me how many people love Forms. I swear, I could nearly sell Google Apps to people just based on Forms. If you've never used it, here is a quick run down of what it can do for you: create a web form very quickly and easily, choosing from a range of different responses including: time (duration and date) multiple choice checkboxes create separate pages based on responses autofill a Google Spreadsheet automatically create a summary of responses with a range of different graphs and information instantly embed it into websites email notifications of changes and updates make you more popular with friends (OK maybe not this one!) Some examples of how I use Google Forms: PC Audit capture make / model, RAM, CPU etc Job Audit bookings for jobs completion of job information Incident responses Seriously they are awesome and if you're trying to do any type of statistics about stuff, they are a terrific pl